Will anyone stand up and take the blame?

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On the Herald's front page yesterday was a picture of an American female soldier holding a leash tied around the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner who was lying on a cell-block floor of Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. In the accompanying story, she is described as a "petite 21-year-old army reservist", who phoned Mum to plead "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time." In the 53-page report filed in February, which nobody outside the Pentagon apparently was ever meant to see, Private First Class Lynndie England was one of three women among seven United States GIs who figure prominently in sworn statements taken during a two-month investigation by Major-General Antonio Taguba.

In one of these statements, quoted by Seymour Hersh in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine, a prison guard, Specialist Mathew Wisdom, testifies: "I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn't think it was right. I saw Sergeant Frederick walking towards me, and he said, 'Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.' I heard PFC England shout out, 'He's getting hard!' "

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The Hersh article could make you weep, if not vomit. He describes what is called an army article 32 hearing, which is testimony given at a closed, preliminary hearing. In it he tells how one of the seven soldiers investigated was Sergeant Ivan Frederick, the soldier named in the Wisdom statement.

Wrote Hersh: "At the article 32 hearing, the army informed Frederick and his attorneys, [including] Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Janis Karpinski [the commanding officer at Abu Ghraib prison who was "disciplined" and quietly sent back to the US last December] and all of Frederick's co-defendants, would not appear.

"Some had been excused after exercising their fifth amendment right. Others were deemed to be 'too far away' from the courtroom. 'The purpose of an article 32 hearing is for us to engage witnesses and discover facts,' Myer told Hersh. 'We ended up with one [army intelligence] agent and no alleged victims to examine.' After the hearing the presiding investigative officer ruled there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick ... "

Another of the ironies of the military and political scandal, with its hundreds of explicit photographs and videos, is that Myers, the civilian lawyer, is identified by Hersh as having been a military defence lawyer in the sensational My Lai prosecutions of the 1970s. It was Hersh's uncovering, of course, of the My Lai massacre of South Vietnamese villagers, including women and children, in the late 1960s that made his name as the most formidable and best known of the investigative journalists of contemporary US journalism.

In his article on the Abu Ghraib scandal, Hersh concludes: "Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick's military attorney, closed his defence at the article 32 hearing [in April] by saying the army was 'attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins'. Similarly, Myers, Frederick's civilian attorney, told me he would argue that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client. 'I'm going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor I can find into court. Do you really believe the army [effectively ended the career] of a general officer [Karpinsky] because of six soldiers? Not a chance!"

Hersh said on SBS television this week: "Clearly there was a total failure of anybody to protect the children we bring into the armed services, that's what enrages me. And to have all the generals say they're just a bunch of bad seeds ... and all saying, 'It wasn't me!' Nobody is standing up and saying, 'We didn't protect the kids we brought in to fight for us.' And you actually have a chairman of the joint chiefs joining in this same sort of, 'Me, I didn't read it, what do I know?' "